Tag Archives: reviews

Gear Review: Double Alpha Dry-Fire Practice Mag

Posted by

If you want to get better at shooting, you take the time to practice gun handling skills in dry fire. One such handling skill is reloading your pistol. It’s pretty easy to practice with the magazines that you normally use, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that you never reload your pistol with an empty magazine.

To add some more verisimilitude to your practice, you could make (or buy) some dummy rounds and load your mag with those. Or, you could get Double Alpha’s new practice magazines.

I picked some up for my open pistol, which is a 2011-type racegun. 2011 magazines aren’t cheap, so I don’t have as many of them as I’d like. The Double Alpha practice magazines fit great in my gun and my mag pouches. Even though I have a newer, convex magwell, I did not need to file or dremel on the magazines to get them to lock in place. Since the mags have a plastic body, it would be easy to file them to fit if I had to deal with tolerance stacking issues.

The Double Alpha practice mags work as advertised, serving as stand-ins for a magazine weighted down with dummy rounds. You can’t actually load any rounds into the Double Alpha practice magazines, so there’s an extra element of safety there. Being purple plastic, they also stand out from your regular magazines.

Let’s get to value. The practice mags retail for $19.95 on Double Alpha’s website. Some value question will come down to do you care about reloading with mags that ‘feel’ loaded, and how much you value your time. If you had a bunch of spare components lying around, you could make some dummy rounds, load those up in your mags, and get to work. This would work even better if you had some old magazines lying around. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for convenience, especially in platforms with expensive magazines.

Fishbreath Shoots: Ruger Super GP100 .357 review

Posted by

Ruger’s been making a big push into the competition world lately, with a USPSA Single Stack-ready 1911 and a Ruger American with slide cuts for Carry Optics. First on the menu from the recently-established Ruger Custom Shop, however, was the Super GP100 in .357 Magnum, a revolver designed from the ground up for practical shooting competitions.

I’ve had this year’s competition revolver in hand for some time now, taken it to two ranges and one match, and put a fair few rounds through it generally.

So, let’s get down to business.

The Gun

The Super GP100 is a .357 Magnum revolver1 built with competition in mind. Though it bears the GP100 name, it is in fact a hybrid design. Its frame is Redhawk-size (that is, large enough for an 8-round cylinder), but its dual-spring lockwork comes from the GP100. The cylinder locks in three places for maximum durability, and is cut down quite a bit to reduce weight.

The trick about revolvers for USPSA (this is one of them) is that an 8-round cylinder is the cost of entry. Under the rules, you can fire eight shots before reloading if you’ve declared Minor power factor, and six if you’ve declared Major. The USPSA rules further say that a stage cannot require more than eight shots from a single shooting position. Fewer than eight rounds loaded, and you have to reload flat-footed. Nobody likes that.

So, although it’s a .357 revolver, I’ll be shooting .38 Special almost exclusively2.

Size, Feel, and Look

To kick things off, it is a big gun. A 5.5″ barrel at the end of a large revolver frame makes for neither a small nor a light handgun. For its purposes, though, this is fine.

It feels pretty good in my hands. I have two minor gripes, however. One, the cylinder release is a bit hard to hit with my strong hand, and is relatively small. (I understand Ruger is working on an extended part.) Two, the stocks aren’t shaped in such a way as to fully promote a hands-high grip—the natural place to put your hands, given the contour of the stocks, is a bit too far down for the proper double-action grip. That can be fixed with aftermarket parts, however, something I may investigate later in the year.

As far as its general appearance, I find it quite handsome indeed. The diagonal cuts in the barrel shroud give it a somewhat retrofuturistic air, along with the fiber-optic front sight, but otherwise, it’s a revolver with classic revolver lines. It wouldn’t look entirely out of place on the set of Firefly, which is an aesthetic I can get behind.

Disassembly and Ease of Maintenance

I do not have very many revolvers, but the Super GP100 is middle-of-the-road on ease of disassembly. Swapping springs or removing the hammer at a match would be a no-go, although the latter is only because there are hammer shims inside to deal with3.

Of course, the manual says that no disassembly is required for basic cleaning. I suspect I’ll take them at their word, and only do the detail strip now and then.

Range Notes

Before the first match, I had two range sessions to come to grips with the gun, one at an indoor range where I did quite a poor dot torture (and ended up adjusting the zero on the sights), and one at an outdoor range with a bunch of steel plates between 15 and 30 yards.

Trigger

Pretty good, out of the box. Better than the 929 Performance Center I tried out at a different local gun store. I haven’t had the chance to play with a slicked-up Smith, so I can’t draw an exact comparison, but even with only lighter springs (no polishing), parvusimperator remarked that it felt pretty good.

The trigger scale says about 7.5lb double action and 2.5lb single action. Single action is a clean break. Double action has a bit of clickiness to it at one point, but I don’t mind.

Accuracy

More accurate than me!

It’s a revolver with a 5.5″ barrel. Not only is the sight radius correspondingly huge, but when it came back from warranty service4, the factory included a copy of the target showing a sub-1″ group at 15 yards.

Given that I’m shooting it double action in a practical shooting sport, that’s plenty sufficient.

Recoil

Tame, at least with .38 Special, which is what most people will be running through it. The gun weighs 44 ounces, plenty to soak up the pop from piddling minor loads.

Reliability

Because this is a competition gun, I didn’t even bother shooting it with stock springs. That, of course, raises questions of reliability.

Unlike my CZ P-09 race gun, which has happily consumed every load I’ve ever fed it, the Super GP100 with lightened springs (a Wolff 9lb mainspring) is a little more finicky. It happily runs on Prvi Partizan .38 Special, but handloads with decade-old CCI primers, though they were reliable in single-action, failed once or twice per cylinder in double-action. Winchester primers of the same vintage worked fine5.

One frequent complaint about .38 Special in competition revolvers is that the ejector won’t fully eject empties. I can confidently say that’s not a problem here—the ejector stroke is long enough to pop empty cases fully out of the cylinder.

Match Notes

Now, we arrive at the meat of the post. The Super GP100 is a competition gun. How can I fully review it if I don’t compete with it?

First thing’s first. Here’s the match video sans commentary. Here it is with commentary, which is probably not going to be too interesting to people without USPSA knowledge ahead of time.

So, how was it in match conditions? Pretty good. Although the stocks, as I mentioned earlier, aren’t quite shaped how I’d like them to be for the grip I want, they’re perfectly acceptable. I didn’t find myself taking the wrong grip out of the holster or off of the table starts, which is a good minimum benchmark.

You might notice in the video that I struggle with reloads in a few places. This is in part due to my inexperience and choice of the wrong basic technique6, but also in part due to the combination of factory ammo without a roll crimp and Ruger’s traditionally-tight chambers. Prvi Partizan-brand .38 Special in both the factory moon clips and the SpeedBeez version binds unless it’s dropped just so7, with the gun almost exactly vertical. Because of the taper on 9mm, it wouldn’t be a problem with the 9mm version, if you’re okay with spitting on revolver tradition8.

Match accuracy is, as I indicated earlier, just fine. I missed a few small steels at long range, but that’s on me more than it is the gun. The sights do come from the factory regulated for a 6-o’clock hold, which is fine if you like it. It’s not what I’m used to, however, especially after a long run of Carry Optics, in which you put the dot on the thing and pull the trigger, so before the next match I’m going up to the range to adjust them for a dead-on hold.

Conclusions

I’ll grant you that I’m not the best person to review competition revolvers. I only have the one, and I don’t have experience with tuned Smith & Wesson guns for comparison purposes.

That said, I’ll still put my recommendation on this one. The problems (iffy reloads with factory ammo, less-than-perfectly-ideal stocks) are relatively minor, and both easily solved (by handloads and by aftermarket grips) are smaller than the benefits (match readiness is a $5 pack of Wolff springs, not a $150 trip to a gunsmith). The value proposition is there, and the performance is nothing to sneeze at either.

  1. You can get it in 9mm too, but 9mm is not a fit caliber for a revolver, no matter what the Revolver Nationals stats say. ↩
  2. Because of USPSA power factor rules, I’m likely to go (in the low-power direction rather than the high-power one) to more esoteric cartridges in the future, like .38 Short Colt or custom cut-down .38 Special. ↩
  3. To put the hammer back in, you stick one shim to it with gun grease, put the hammer pin through that shim and into the hammer, and push the opposite shim into the frame with a piece of paper. ↩
  4. It came with a misaligned barrel shroud assembly. Ruger was highly accommodating, and had it turned around inside a week. ↩
  5. I understand that primers have been getting more sensitive over the years—thus saith the Lee reloading book, along with some random forum posters. Today’s CCI primers might work. Perhaps I’ll pick up a box at the reloading-supplies counter of the friendly local gun store. ↩
  6. I’m writing a post on this, too, but it comes down to gross motor movements with my dominant hand against fine motor movements with my weak hand, and I should have realized that before practicing the latter a bunch. ↩
  7. I bought a reloading press to solve this problem. It was always an inevitability once I started shooting competitive revolver, because you get to keep all your brass, but this is a bit ahead of schedule. Anyway, a roll crimp into the SNS Casting 158-grain coated bullets’ crimp groove drops easily9. ↩
  8. I’ve come down hard on 9mm revolvers, but it’s good-natured. If you’re considering shooting a revolver at USPSA matches, pick whatever caliber you want. (And granted, 9mm has advantages.) The division needs you. ↩
  9. Because I bought a gun that Just Works, like parvusimperator’s Open blaster, I have to find my tinkering where I can, and that’s evidently at the reloading bench. Next year: .38 Short Colt? ↩

Book Review: Chassepot to FAMAS: French Military Rifles 1866-2016

Posted by

Ian’s book is out. How is it?

Disclosure time: I was a backer of this book on Kickstarter, for what that’s worth. Mostly because I wanted to support Ian and his new publishing company. Take that as you will. I was pretty ambivalent about French Military rifles when I backed it.

First off, the production values of the book are amazingly good. The book itself has a really nice cover: it’s hardbound in a leathery, old-world sort of way, and it’s full of really good color pictures. These pictures were done carefully with good lighting, and they are always very clear. I don’t think I have nicer reference books, and Fishbreath can confirm I have lots of reference books.

Next, the material. French rifles aren’t commonly discussed in a book in English, which makes this a pretty unique work. And, the French tend to go their own way a lot, so lots of the engineering is unique. The reasoning and doctrines may also be not what you are used to. I’m not an expert on French Rifles, so I can’t attest to how thorough the book is. But Ian is pretty well known as a knowledgeable source on firearms in general and French military firearms in particular, so this is as good as you’re likely to get in English.

The French often come up with their own answers to doctrine or engineering questions. Or, perhaps that’s because the American stuff I’m most familiar with usually cribs from someone else for small arms. Anyway, because the French stuff is usually somewhat different, it’s a more interesting book than it would be if we were just revisiting clones of the Mauser action.

So let’s get down to it. Should you buy this book? I’m gonna go with a ‘yes’ if you’re even remotely interested in firearms or enjoy Ian’s content over at Forgotten Weapons. And I really do, even if I sometimes disagree with him.

Fishbreath Plays: Armored Brigade Review

Posted by

As the annual treachery of daylight saving’s close casts its pall over Many Words HQ here in Western Pennsylvania, we turn our attention to another hilly part of the world of somewhat greater interest to wargamers and the broader defense affairs community: the Fulda Gap.

Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm is my current recommendation for the definitive Cold War armored combat command experience. Can Armored Brigade unseat it? Read on to find out!

Continue reading →

Parvusimperator Reviews: Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

Posted by

Remaking movies is a terrible, terrible idea. Remaking video games can be a great idea, and Resident Evil 2 is a good example of a remake done right. The original was made in 1998 on the original playstation, featuring PSX graphics, fixed perspective cameras, and the sort of “tank controls”1 that only die hard purists and masochists enjoy.

Modernizing the game was done with the help of the engine from Resident Evil 7, giving modern controls and excellent modern graphics. Interestingly, and unlike Resident Evil 7, the remake of Resident Evil 2 has a third-person perspective. It’s a well done third person, and I’m ok with that.

Some of the structure of Resident Evil 2 remains intact. You can choose between one of two characters, Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield for your playthrough of the story, and then you can opt to play as the other character for a complimentary story. Leon and Claire have some different boss fights, different weapons, different collectibles, go through different areas, and even work with different NPC helpers. There’s plenty of replay value to be had here.

There’s more fun to be had in the extra modes. There’s The 4th Survivor, which changes the formula by giving you an inventory full of weapons and healing items, but has nothing for you to pick up to restock with. Then there are some DLC scenarios which add some new zombie types, lootable backpacks, explosive backpacks, and vending machines. The vending machines are a neat twist, with each one featuring three items, but you can only pick one of them.

If you’re a fan of survival horror, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.

  1. Amusingly, while I love tanks almost as much as the Stavka, I do not enjoy classic Resident Evil “tank controls” at all. ↩

Parvusimperator Reviews: Ace Combat 7

Posted by

My first flight gaming love was, like that of many youngsters, something very arcade-y. Namely: Rogue Squadron. Recently, I decided to return to my arcadey roots and pick up Ace Combat 7, the latest entry in a series that I had last played on the Playstation 2.

To repeat, this is an Arcade Flight Game (TM). Your plane carries over one hundred missiles, and you’ll have targets for all of them. If you’re expecting realism, go look up some DCS reviews.

Ace Combat 7 is set in the fun Namco-created world called “Strangereal” which was probably made by someone cutting an existing world map into pieces and then playing around with them. All the country names are fake and any resemblance to actual countries is purely coincidental by design. So we don’t have to argue about how many planes some country really has. Oh, and everybody gets to mix types, because engaging a flight of Tu-160s escorted by Mirage 2000-5s is awesome. You also have a big tree of unlockable aircraft and parts to buy with points earned from missions. Those missions are graded, of course.

The missions themselves are a pretty solid grab bag of types, though the escort ones are a hot mess. Par for the course, really: escort missions are always made of suck. Missions where you have lots of targets to destroy are a good time, as expected. There are also a few missions where you have to work on your target identification. You won’t know whether a target is hostile or not until you get close enough for positive identification. Shades of Vietnam there. And of course, there are ‘boss fights’ with either giant enemies with lots of sub-components or fancy plot armor. Again, nothing too fancy or out of the ordinary.

Overall, Ace Combat 7 is an excellent entry in a field that doesn’t have a lot of recent games. If you like lobbing lots of missiles at things, give this one a try. It’s loads of fun.

Fishbreath Plays: Masks: A New Generation Review

Posted by

In Tuesday’s post, I promised a review of Masks: A New Generation, and ended up talking roleplaying game1 history instead. Today, there are fewer distracting topics to soak up a thousand words, so I have high hopes that this post will, in fact, be what the headline says.

Masks is a superhero RPG. It is not, however, an RPG about heroes at the height of their powers. Rather, it’s a game about teenage heroes, in the vein of Teen Titans or the Young Avengers.

This is a brilliant move. Superhero stories are fundamentally about human drama, and what’s more dramatic than a bunch of teenagers2? A game focusing on fully-realized adult heroes leaves a lot of storytelling potential on the table, because the story of growing up is one which resonates with just about every human on the planet, and is one which just about every human on the planet is equipped to tell themselves. Not only does Masks pick good subject matter, it has mechanics which help to push the story it’s trying to tell along. We’ll come back to that.

The rules system is the Powered by the Apocalypse engine, one of the first rulesets in the modern narrative tradition, whose terminology is something of a modern standard.

So, the combination of your character class and character sheet is called your playbook, and it contains just about everything you need to play the game, provided you have a reference for basic moves. Moves, by the way, are the things your character can do. They’re little snippets of game mechanics triggered by fictional events. Do the thing in the fiction, and the mechanics happen. It plays naturally. As a player, you narrate, and your narration makes things happen in the rules. In terms of dice, you roll 2d6 and add a modifier, succeeding partially on 7-9 and fully on 10 or more.

To this winning formula3, Masks adds its own wrinkles, as you do. The most important variations are Labels and Influence.

Masks calls your stats Labels. This is not a mere cosmetic difference. Labels don’t represent physical traits. Rather, they represent how a character sees herself, and how the world sees her. Your Danger, say, is how much you perceive yourself to be a bloody-knuckled bruiser, always ready to charge into a fight, and how much the world sees you as a destructive menace. When you trigger the move ‘directly engage a threat’, you roll plus your Danger. Is it strange that your self-conception changes how effective you are in a straight fight? At first blush, yes, but on reflection, it makes a lot of sense. How many superhero stories are there where the hero loses when he faces the villain the first time, gets his head in the right place, and wins the next battle?

Which brings me to my next point. Because Labels represent a character’s self-conception, they move. A lot. When you’re young, what people think about you matters. Masks models this mechanically. Other player characters and NPCs can have Influence over your character, which indicates that your character cares what they think of him. When a character has Influence over yours, they can shift your Labels (one up, one down) if they tell you what you are or how the world works. Part of character advancement (which, in the game’s fiction, represents growing up, or at least growing into your image of yourself) is learning to shut out what other people tell you and to know who you are, which is represented by casting off other peoples’ Influence and by locking your Labels so that they can no longer be shifted.

As is common in narrative games, there is no separate combat mode, just more narration and an emphasis on different moves off of the master list. Conditions come into play more in combat, as well, where they are a possible consequence of taking a hit. (They’re also possible consequences a number of other places throughout the system.) Conditions are negative emotions, rather than physical drawbacks—you might be Angry, say, or Hopeless. Again, this seems strange at first blush, but makes perfect sense given the fiction. Superheroes get back up after they take hits. The way to knock them out isn’t to beat them senseless, it’s to beat them hopeless. And, of course, we’re talking teenagers here. Emotions running wild is the name of the game4.

Character creation deserves some mention too. Masks leans heavily into its nature as a story game, so when you choose a playbook, you aren’t choosing a power set, but a character arc. The Beacon and the Delinquent playbooks are both relatively low-powered, street-level heroes, but they tell different stories: the Beacon as the hopeful kid who has to fight off allegations that he doesn’t belong, the Delinquent as, well, the delinquent, disrespectful of authority at the same time as she plays the trickster or causes trouble to attract its attention. The Nova and the Legacy are high-powered heroes, but one deals with internal conflict over the destructive nature of her own powers, and the other deals with external conflict between himself and those who went before him.

The rules suggest what modern games call a ‘session zero’, where you go through character creation together. By design, the core Masks rulebook doesn’t provide very much information on its setting, Halcyon City. The players get to fill in some of the blanks. At the end of character creation, the gamemaster asks each player a question, found on the back of his playbook, about the incident which brought the player characters together into a team. This does a few things: it gives the PCs a reason to be together, lets every player put her stamp on the world, and elides the origin story somewhat to get the game rolling faster.

Masks does this a lot, using its rules to incentivize forming bonds between characters. Working as a team has advantages. One of the easiest ways to clear conditions requires two characters to have a heart-to-heart conversation—and the other easy way requires a character to act badly with respect to his team, which is a great source of future drama. At the end of each session, each player gets a free move by which they can trade revealing some of their character’s hidden depths for various positive effects.

All of this makes Masks a joy to run. Even with characters thrown together on the spur of the moment5, the systems sing, driving interesting character interactions with very little effort. The section on advice for gamemasters is useful, too, in particular in two places. ‘Ask questions’ is good advice for gamemasters in any system, but it’s especially good here. Players don’t have to rigorously define their characters’ powers or backstories ahead of time, so asking questions helps to clarify and crystallize. It also keeps the focus on the players and their characters, and pushes the game in the action-packed direction you would expect from comic books.

Even better is the advice to narrate not merely according to comic book tropes, but even as though you’re describing a comic book itself. I started my first session by talking about the cover of the issue. I finished it with a full-page, divided-in-three panel showing a slice of life for each of our characters6. In both cases, it rooted the world in its comic book heritage, helped keep the players focused on the same, and finally, gave them a moment in the spotlight to shine and to reveal a bit more about their characters.

There are some downsides, which I’ll hit on quickly here.

First: like all narrative games, it takes a gamemaster with a penchant for rapid improvisation. There’s very little theme written down ahead of time, so you have to be familiar with what your players come up with and quick to build plot hooks. Happily, there’s advice for gamemasters on improvising.

Second: because the game focuses so heavily on relationship mechanics, you all but need three player characters, or at the very least, two characters and a robust cast of near-permanent NPCs. Four or five players is better.

Third: as in most narrative-heavy games, the players have both great power over the world and great responsibility to it7. It’s not the kind of game that stands up well to people trying to win it. Collaboration is key, along with players willing to limit themselves for the sake of drama8.

Fourth: it’s not as open-ended as, say, D&D. If you play for a long time, eventually your characters will advance to the point where they’re left with the choice of retiring from the masked life and going back to being a normal citizen, or turning into a paragon of the city and joining the ranks of Halcyon’s leading heroes. In both cases they turn into NPCs. It’s not the kind of game where you can play the same character forever. The flip side of each playbook having a clearly defined character arc is that character arcs eventually draw to a close.

In the final reckoning, I think it’s obvious that I give Masks the thumbs-up. It does exactly what it says on the tin: generates engaging stories about a team of young superheroes, with clearly-defined beginnings, middles, and ends9. It makes playing out inter-character drama mechanically rewarding, captures the essence of coming-of-age stories, and remains a playable, entertaining RPG.

If you don’t like teenagers, if crunchy combat is more your speed, or if you don’t like what I’ve said in this post and Tuesday’s about narrative games, you might want to give it a pass. Otherwise, I say it’s worth your time.

  1. Over on Discord, Kilo Sierra pointed out that ‘RPG’, in the context of the Soapbox, generally means something else. ↩
  2. I would apologize to our teenage readers if, according to our analytics, we had any. ↩
  3. At least, industry awards and player happiness suggests it’s winning. ↩
  4. I recognize you may be skeptical—I was, too. Playing the game disabused me of my skepticism. I won’t go any further out of my way to convince you to change your mind, but I will at least say it’s worth your time to try a session even if you doubt it’ll work. ↩
  5. An Incredibles knock-off, a guy who wants to kiss the Stanley Cup before his impending doom arrives, and someone ripped from the pages of a piece of fiction I’m working on. My wife and I were visiting family, and we played with my brother-in-law for two and a half hours one afternoon. You will note there were only three people involved and yet there were also three characters. I ran one as a GM PC, because Masks is iffy with only two players, for reasons I’ll get into later in the review. ↩
  6. In the upper left: Sam Skipper, a.k.a. the Shadow, my masked darkness-controller, wearing a big smile and asking asking an off-panel customer, “Do you want fries with that?” at his day job. In the upper right: John Zigel, my brother-in-law’s doomed memory-manipulator, brooding on his couch watching hockey. (He’s the one who wants to kiss the Cup.) In the bottom: Jill-Jill Parr, my wife’s acrobatic short-range-teleporting type, ignoring a stack of homework while she works on her original manga and ponders putting a streak of orange in her hair with an illicit bottle of hair dye. ↩
  7. You didn’t think you were getting out of here without something like this, did you? ↩
  8. If you want a game of a similar character (but a very different theme) which can better stand up to players who want to win, have a look at Blades in the Dark. It’s similar to Masks in terms of play style and ethos, but has tighter constraints for the players and leaves more power in the gamemaster’s hands. ↩
  9. Like a lot of games in this genre, it falls down if you push it too far outside its comfort zone. Masks would not make a very good game about adult superheroes, because adults aren’t as malleable as youngsters are. ↩

Fishbreath Plays: The History of Narrative RPGs

Posted by

But first, a report Fishbreath the Web Lackey: there are some problems with the VPS on which Many Words runs, one of the symptoms of which is intermittent kernel panics on heavy network traffic. Not a great problem for a web server to be having, right? We are, by which I mean I am, working on it. If you notice any instability, blame the kernel grognards. And now, we return you to Fishbreath the Correspondent for today’s article.

You may know us primarily as defense affairs nerds, gun nerds, and occasionally video game nerds, but really, we’re multirole nerds. Full spectrum nerds. Joint nerds. So, on those grounds, and on the grounds that parvusimperator hasn’t scheduled anything for today and therefore has no basis for complaint, herein I will briefly review Masks: A New Generation, a tabletop roleplaying game from Magpie Games (n.b. affiliate link).

Except I’m now about a thousand words into this post and haven’t made it to actually reviewing the game, so we’ll make it a two-parter instead.

Masks belongs to the narrative game genre. To understand what that means, we’ll have to take a little trip through the history of the hobby, and of the tradition that narrative games are distancing themselves from. That’s what we’ll do this time out.

The year is 1974. For some time now, miniatures wargames have been popular. Some enterprising nerds asked themselves, how can we raise the stakes? First among these nerds was Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons1. The answer was simple: what if, instead of controlling a small army of guys with very little detail, you controlled instead a single guy with lots of detail?

D&D was the first tabletop roleplaying game. It was played very differently then than it is now: the older you go in the D&D tradition, the more lethal fighting is, and the less there is to do outside of what is today referred to as the loot treadmill2. There are islands of civilization. You venture outside those islands into a vast, dark sea of uncaring wildnerness filled with vicious monsters, whack the monsters until they yield their stashes of loot, and return to civilization to sell it all, enjoy your wealth, and prepare for another trip. Many of the early D&D adventures don’t make very much sense outside of this framework.

By being first, D&D cemented its place at the center of the RPG ecosystem. Settings grew more varied and left more room for intrigue, the degree of combat-centeredness in the rules ebbed and flowed (and ebbed and flowed), and modern live-play podcasts and web video series pushed the storytelling aspects of tabletop roleplaying to center stage3, but at its core, D&D’s DNA never changed. It’s a miniatures wargame4 with a dash of improvisational theater.

The two aspects, however, don’t always play well together. Oral storytelling has a rhythm to it which is easy to interrupt. Questions like, “How much taller can I make myself with Disguise Self?” or “Am I able to cast Teleport from here, or do I need to be in a teleportation circle?” slow you down at the least desirable time: moments of high drama. If that’s bad, combat is worse. Effectively, it’s a second mode of play, where the roleplaying largely cuts out and the focus switches to fight tactics5.

That’s the tradition narrative games aim to break away from. If D&D and its family tree are miniatures wargames with improv theater shoehorned in, why not write games as improv theater with rules shoehorned in?

Narrative games are in vogue at the moment, but they aren’t a recent trend. Apocalypse World, one of the major English-language trend-setters, was released in 2010. Ryuutama, a Japanese storytelling RPG with many of the genre’s common features (gamemasters with intentionally limited power, for one), came out in 2007. You can even make an argument that old versions of Paranoia belong more nearly to the narrative tradition than to the classic RPG tradition6.

So, what’s the difference? Narrative games are, not to put too fine a point on it, all about narration. Apocalypse World and its rules engine Powered by the Apocalypse are the archetypal examples. On your character sheet is a list of moves. These moves have fictional triggers. When (and only when) the ongoing narration matches the trigger, the move happens7.

Other features you might find include a collaborative worldbuilding process, a ‘session zero’ plan which involves building up the party and its history, and gamemaster moves which limit (or at least indicate the intended boundaries of) GM power.

What’s the upshot? Less staring at character sheets trying to figure out what to do next, more storytelling; less mode-switching to rules-heavy contexts, more natural interplay between story and rules.

Masks in particular does a few things very well. It also illustrates some of the shortcomings of narrative games better than I could describe them. I’ll cover both topics next time.

  1. Trademarked ampersand intentionally left out. ↩
  2. This image isn’t a perfect fit, but eventually you get to the point where the world itself trembles before you. ↩
  3. To the point that it’s entirely feasible to play a long and satisfying campaign of Dungeons and Dragons without encountering either dungeons or dragons. ↩
  4. Whose complexity has varied over the years. You could probably play a fighter-rogue-wizard party in 5e solo. It would be much more difficult in 4e, and you probably wouldn’t even make it past character creation in 3.5. ↩
  5. Don’t read this to mean that I think crunch or tactical combat are bad. In fact, I enjoy them for what they are, and my own game system, RPJ, uses moderately crunchy rules and combat. ↩
  6. It’s easy to miss this with Paranoia 2e, because it predates the modern narrative trend by three decades and therefore doesn’t use the same language, but it fits on several counts. Super-simple combat rules which the game more or less encourages you to ignore? Check. A focus on ruling consistently and fairly, within the constraints of the setting where the gamemaster is mostly playing an insane computer, rather than in perfect alignment with a Most Holy Rulebook? Check. (Put another way, it fails gracefully.) Ingenious use of in-character incentives to drive player behavior? Check. (Attempting to rules-lawyer out of character is taken as some expression of treason in-character, and traitors deserve the same treatment as mutants and commies.) It’s not a perfect match, but it’s closer to a modern narrative game than it is to D&D in a lot of ways, 20-sided dice notwithstanding. ↩
  7. There are variations on the theme. Blades in the Dark, another very popular entry in the genre, gives players a list of broad action ratings (Consort, Prowl, Skirmish…) rather than moves (‘engage a dangerous threat’, ‘assess the situation’…), and gives players more agency both in choosing which action rating they’d like to use and in shaping scenes to make a given action rating fit. ↩

Parvusimperator Reviews Suicide Squad

Posted by

Yes, I know it’s old. But I wondered to myself, “Self, how could they screw this up? There are a ton of Dirty Dozen ripoffs out there. This one has Will Smith, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, and The Joker. This should be easy to at least get to mediocre.” Well, here at the Soapbox sometimes I watch awful movies so you don’t have to.

And it is just as bad as the critics say. Sometimes they get it right. This is trash. And it’s sad, because this should be lots of fun. Dirty Dozen with comic book villains is a great premise. I’d greenlight that for production. And it’s not like DC doesn’t have any cool villains. So what went wrong? All kinds of stuff.

This movie had a lame plot. Of course, I don’t exactly expect anything wonderful from this sort of movie. The problems run deeper though. The structure is bad. It seemed like the writers couldn’t figure out what tone they wanted, and kept changing the serious/cheesy balance. And they felt the need to put in a lot of badly-structured backstory. It just didn’t work, and it was hard to follow. And it’s unnecessary. This is a superhero movie with relatively well-known villains as protagonists. Give everyone a quick establishing bit with a touch of voiceover and call it good. Honestly, you could probably run the script through a bunch of rewrites and eventually get something good. But you’d have to redo the whole script. I’m told this movie had some reshot sections in order to fix things, but that didn’t help anything.

I want to make note of a few things regarding casting and dialogue. Will Smith seemed kinda wooden and decidedly unfunny, which usually takes some effort. Plus, Deadshot’s fight work hasn’t aged well. We still have lots of jump cuts, and John Wick is just better in every way. On the decidedly positive side is Margot Robbie, who did a great job as Harley Quinn. Really, she’s one of the few who looked like she was having fun in this awful movie.

Parvusimperator Reviews: Marvel’s Spider-Man

Posted by

I am sick to the back teeth of giant ensemble cast superhero movies, and I’ve played a ton of bad superhero games in my youth. For a game to stand out, it needs to be amazing. Spectacular, even. Insomniac Games has stepped up with their take on everyone’s favorite web-slinging hero in Marvel’s Spider-Man.

Things the game does right: damn near everything. First, pitfalls avoided. It’s not a rehash of the origin story, thank God and Stan Lee. We’ve got a somewhat-experienced Peter Parker here who doesn’t have to “learn how to be Spider-Man” for the millionth time. It’s not a redo of any other story either. They’ve gone and made their own story for you to enjoy.

Let’s talk about that story some more. It is brand new, but it checks all of the boxes that you would expect from a Spider-Man story. We’ve got complications. We’ve got good characters who are going to TURN BAD. We’ve got touching moments with MJ. We’ve got financial woes. We’ve got perpetual tardiness. We’ve got Spidey Quips. We’ve got famous villains that you know and love to hate. We’ve got J. Jonah Jameson (now with a radio show) calling you a MENACE and accusing you of being in cahoots with various evildoers. We even have a cameo appearance from the late Stan Lee himself. And there’s a brassy, awesome soundtrack that feels very ‘comic book movie’.

Being a Spider-Man game, this is set in New York City, and the devs at Insomniac did a great job of giving you a lovingly recreated Manhattan to play in. Thanks to modern processing power, you can web swing from Harlem to Wall Street without any loading screens. There are tons of recognizable New York City landmarks for you to see, plus a whole bunch of appropriate Marvel landmarks, like Avengers Tower. And you get around via web-swinging, which is the right mix of simple controls, dynamism, and just a bit of imprecision to be tremendous fun. It’s very easy to get the hang of, and it looks right out of a good Spider-Man movie.

On to combat! Combat feels like a somewhat more refined version of what we see in the Arkham games. More refined in the sense that Spidey’s gadgets are a lot better integrated into the fighting. It’s a lot easier to select gadgets, and they fit into your other attack and evasion work really nicely. Another nice feature is the combo bar. Fill it, and you get a finishing move, but you can also use it to replenish your health.

I would also like to praise the randomized minor crime mechanic. In each section of Manhattan, there are various factions who might do some crimes like try to hijack an armored truck. And, of course, you can go stop them. The timers are such that I never felt that I was overwhelmed by crime, or had somehow gone back to pre-Giuliani New York. Plus, after you stop a set number of crimes (five per faction, usually) those stop. Which is nice, because I get really sick when those become never-ending like the dragon encounters in Skyrim.

And now, things I don’t like. Happily, it’s a short list. First, there are sidequests that seem to require more precision in the web-swinging than the system is capable of delivering, which makes them a giant pain. Those quests were both frustrating and verisimilitude-breaking, as I felt like some sort of useless tetherball, not an amazing superhero. Happily, those quests are both few and number and entirely optional. The other annoying bits are the parts where you’re playing as Peter Parker (i.e. not costumed) and you have to walk around between cutscenes. With the exception of the bits in the lab, where there are plenty of things to mess around with, these felt entirely superfluous. Just work it into one cutscene, guys. It’s ok.

Overall though, it’s a great game. Highly recommended.